Cascade Point

"Sure does," Charley agreed as they all sat down around the table. It ought to, he thought wryly; the bottle had been only two-thirds full of bourbon before he'd filled it up with straight ethanol.

The other workers joined into the spirit of the occasion with remarkable speed. Passing the bottle around the circle—a method that allowed Charley to keep his own consumption to practically zero—they were soon laughing and talking boisterously, wishing Charley good luck in the days ahead. Charley joined in the laughter, and kept the bottle moving.

Lanthrop had a reasonable capacity, but with his head start he was roaring drunk before anyone else was even close, and by the time someone suggested it was time to return upstairs he was sprawled in his chair, slumbering peacefully. Assuring the others he would take care of the boss, Charley waited until they had staggered out, and then set to work. Setting Lanthrop into a more comfortable position, he relieved the field boss of his master keys, replacing them with his own public-area set to keep the loss from being too obvious. His next task took him to the main file room, where the employment records and resumes of every worker in the nation were stored on huge reels of holo-magnetic tape. This was the riskiest part of his plan—the file room co

Now came the waiting. From conversations with others, he knew that Director Pines invariably arrived early on Monday mornings, usually before the night shift was due to check out. If Charley's luck held, this would be one of those mornings.

—

It was.

Pines was four steps into his office before he noticed Charley sitting quietly by the wall. "Who are you?" he asked, stopping abruptly, apparently too startled for the moment to be angry.

Charley remained seated. "I'm Charles Addison. We met a couple of weeks ago."

The mental wheels visibly clicked into place. "Why, you—you—" he sputtered. "Get the hell out of my office—you hear me? Now!" He stepped forward menacingly.

"Before you do anything drastic," Charley suggested, "you ought to take a look over there in the corner."

Pines came to an abrupt halt. "My tapes!" he exclaimed, the first hint of uneasiness creeping through his anger. "What are you doing with them?"

"Engaging in an old custom called blackmail," Charley told him, glancing at the pile. It was an unusual sight, he had to admit: three tape reels—minus their protective casings—stacked neatly beneath the old floor buffer. "Magnetic tapes have come a long way in fifty years, especially in storage density, but they still have an unavoidable weakness: they're susceptible to strong electromagnetic fields. That thing on top is an old electric floor buffer. It packs a huge electric motor."

Pines understood, all right. Already his eyes were flickering between the tapes and Charley, clearly wondering whether he could beat Charley to the buffer's switch. He was bracing himself to charge when Charley raised his hand, showing the director that he held the machine's plug. "The buffer's switched on already," he explained. "All I have to do is plug it in. You can't possibly reach either the tapes or me before they're ruined, so you might as well sit down and relax."

"You're insane," Pines muttered as he sank into a nearby chair. "You can get twenty years for sabotaging government property like this."

"So far nothing's been damaged," Charley assured him. "You're right, of course, I'll be in big trouble if I plug this in. But have you considered what'll happen to you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Your security's gotten pretty lax. I got into the file room without any trouble, picked up these tapes, and just walked out with them. That's going to make your department look pretty bad."

"You couldn't have taken them out of the building, though—there's an alarm- trigger built into each of the reels."

"Oh? I didn't know that. But that hasn't prevented me from threatening them here in the building itself. I wonder what your bosses at the Labor Department are going to say."

Pines was begi

"I'm sure most tapes would be easy to reconstruct," Charley nodded. "With the job market shifting so often, I imagine ninety percent of your master tapes are duplicated at any given time in the thousands of temporary bubble storages you've got in the local offices around the country. But I'll bet that some of the files on these three aren't. Don't you want to know which tapes I've got here?"

Pines's eyes flickered to the pile. "All right—tell me."

"They're the complete records of some people who haven't gone through the lottery for a few years now: the President, Cabinet, Supreme Court, most of Congress, and the top people in the Foreign Service, military, and federal judiciary. If I plug this in, you'll have to go to every single one of those people and ask for access to their Secure Personal Files to get the information back. Still think your bosses won't say anything?"

Pines went white. "No!" he hissed. "You wouldn't!"

"That's entirely up to you. You get me my job back at Key Data Services and no one will ever hear about this from me. I'll walk out that door and you'll never see me again."

"At least until you start demanding money," Pines said bitterly.

"With a twenty-year jail sentence hanging over my head? Don't be absurd. Besides, what would I blackmail you with—the use of your legitimate authority to correct an error?" Charley shook his head.

"But the rules—"

"—aren't in charge here: you are. And you're here because the rules don't adapt to these unexpected changes, to things that shouldn't have happened but did anyway. If they could—if computers could balance justice and mercy—you wouldn't be needed. As it is, a system like the National Employment Office couldn't exist without you—it would have been torn apart years ago."

For a moment Pines gazed into space. Then, with just a glance at the tapes, he stepped over to his desk terminal. "What was the name of that company again?"

And Charley knew he'd won.

—

"Frankly, Charley, I never expected to see you at this desk again—but I'm damn glad I was wrong," Will Whitney said, smiling like his face was going to split.

"Me, neither," Charley agreed, savoring the feel of his old chair as he gazed at the piles of work on his desk. "I'm glad to see you can still use me. I was half afraid Sanders would've completely taken over by now."

"You kidding? He's happier to have you back than I am." Whitney shook his head. "I'd never realized before how indispensable you are to KDS. I'm glad you found someone in Washington who agreed." Charley gri

Afterword

This was my first real foray into the world of business and finance; and as far as I'm concerned, those already in the field can have it. I'll take wading through lunar maps and the physics of black holes any day.